


we the incondite

by sarensen



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Charles is fucked up, M/M, Manipulation, Mind Games, inappropriate use of mind powers, or maybe it's all in Erik's head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 13:03:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6908347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarensen/pseuds/sarensen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find balance in imperfection. Someone else's unfinished story.</p>
<p>(Please read the tags on this one.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	we the incondite

Charles comes to him at night, in the quiet and the dark and in soft touches and eyes that say 'I have seen deep and dark places inside of you and I want to go exploring'.

His smile is brilliant against the black and Erik is quite defenseless against the heat and the nearness of Charles, pressing him back up against the wall. He holds onto Charles' wrists because he has nowhere else to put his hands, and says, "You were sleeping."

Erik berates himself that stating the obvious was the first thing that occurred to him; frowns at the top of a black head and squirms because they don‘t know each other well enough yet for this. 

"I was sleeping," affirms Charles' muffled voice from the neighbourhood of Erik's collarbone, "But I woke up. You were gone." 

They're in the vicinity of the middle of nowhere, some fucked up American motel they'd seen from the highway. They'd been driving for eighteen hours and three mutants, and Erik doesn't do well in close proximity to others. Every day carries him further from the unmitigated violence he'd sworn to, brings him out of that black place he'd been living in in the back of his mind and closer to a man who might be more dangerous even than Schmidt - if a lot easier on the eyes. It's uncomfortable.

"I--," Erik pauses to exhale sharply, "--went for walk. Charles." He lets go of bony wrists to push ineffectually against the warm pajama jacket, "Charles, don't."

A few moments pass as the moist warmth on Erik's neck slows, pauses and finally lifts away. Charles looks confused. His hair is sticking up in the shape of the indent in his pillow.

"I thought you wanted this, Erik?" he keeps his tone carefully light, keeps his body stationary but close.

Erik looks at the lampshade on the bedside table, the beds, the windows and the streetlight outside - catalogues the metal in each - and doesn't look at Charles (no metal, just pajama cotton and bare feet and bed hair).

Charles would need a microscope to study him any more intently.

Eventually, Erik stares somewhere at his chin and concedes, "This is not a good idea."

Charles huffs a laugh, almost incredulous, and tilts his head. "Erik, really? But I... Was I wrong?" He says it as if it couldn't be possible. "I thought you wanted..."

A long silence stretches in which neither of them says anything and Charles keeps looking at Erik and Erik keeps not looking at Charles.

Finally Charles sighs, makes a fist against the wall by Erik's head. "Do you... You think you don't deserve this. Don't deserve me? Is that it?"

Erik looks at him in surprise. "No, Charles... It's you who doesn't deserve me."

 

Charles doesn't talk to Erik again until noon the next day.

***

The car is too hot and the road is endless. Brown scenery melts into brown scenery, day into night and night into day again. Monotony dulls the conversation. Eventually Erik admits defeat and reaches over the gearbox to take Charles’ hand.

***

The first catalyst in their relationship comes in the form of a little English-style pub off the interstate. They stretch, sit down, order food. Erik feels nostalgic and finds a tune on the jukebox. They leave the briefcase on the black-white checker tiles and rest their arms on the high booth.

It's when Charles gets drunk that the fun starts.

Erik has long known the relationship between alcohol and inhibitions and restricts himself to a Coke. Charles has no such qualms. So Erik sips cold amber and watches with a partly amused twitch of the lips as the young Professor relates the personal thoughts of all the pub tenants.

Then he starts quoting books that haven't been published yet. Whiskey and beer and vodka disappear indiscriminately down Charles' throat as he rambles on about reading the Devil's mind (which Erik dismisses as fanciful) and his theories on genetic normalisation (which Erik only half catches, lost in the haze of smoke and Elvis on the jukebox).

"You know, I could control the world if I wanted to," is the whimsical murmur that finally snaps Erik's attention back to Charles, who he finds leaning onto his shoulder, "I could make everyone do what I wanted. Dance like puppets on a string."

The words strike Erik cold for their truthfulness; he's seen Charles manipulate and connive and conceal and outright overpower people with his mind, but has guessed at a much deeper well of potential: he'd be lying if he said he hasn't considered exploiting it for his own ends.

So he says, more calmly than he feels, "What are you talking about, Charles? You would never do that to another person,“ he smiles reassuringly, “Take away their free will."

"Oh, but I could. I have. I mean... I've wanted to."

And it takes barely a second for the pub to freeze, every suggestion of life or sound or movement utterly removed, but for one woman in a corner by the window. She looks around herself, suddenly fearful; jumps up, knocking her chair back. She scratches at her arms, her stomach, tears at the folds of her skirt until it threads into a heap at her feet. And she screams. It is the sound of terror, the sound of deep psychological fear that Erik knows only because he's been the cause of it himself a few times.

He looks at Charles, who has two fingers to his temple and a drunkenly genial expression. "Charles."

Lowered fingers, and in a flash the pub is returned to normal. People laugh and smoke and drink, music plays, and in the corner by the window the woman sits undisturbed.

"It was in my head," Erik says. It's not a question.

"Do you understand now, Erik?" Charles slurs, massaging Erik's thigh absently, his eyes a million miles away, "Do you see? It's easy for me to control everyone. Much harder to control me."

It is the first time Erik thinks maybe Charles does deserve him after all.

***

It’s another city, another motel, but it might as well be every other shithole they’ve ever stayed in. Brown and yellow and orange wallpaper, sand-coloured carpets and clean sheets, albeit with some dubious stains.

Erik is surprised at how quiet Charles is when they fuck. He has Charles up against the wall, pants shoved down to his ankles and Charles’ eyes are wrinkled shut but his mouth is open in a silent groan, smearing a wet smudge on the wallpaper. His fingers curl and uncurl, scratching for purchase.

They haven't kissed. Erik shoves him perhaps a bit hard; grunts in pain when Charles slips on him and tugs them both down a bit. He bites Charles’ nape, shifts his feet for balance and thrusts again in retaliation.

Erik considered being more gentle, but almost immediately cast the thought aside in favour of pursuing his own selfish fulfillment; he knows he can’t make Charles do anything he doesn’t explicitly agree to anyway. And, he thinks, Charles is enjoying it. His nails dig into Erik’s wrist, clench a vice tight enough to bruise.

It’s a massacre. His breath burns in his lungs and his thighs ache; his elbow bruises systematically against the wall. He’s so close, so close; his arms throb with holding Charles’ weight.

The pleasure is searing, some of it his own and some of it Charles’, pushed into his head like cheese through a grater and it shakes him right to the spine, this burning and brilliant bliss.

But then Charles, through the silent gasping and heaving, lets slip the tiniest whimper, and it is not a sound a pleasure, but rather one of pain. 

And it occurs to Erik in a rush of cold that Charles perhaps isn’t enjoying it. That maybe he doesn't like it rough; that he's plucked the violence out of Erik's head instead and turned it on himself out of some sort of twisted compassion because Charles would do that, that’s just who he is. He wouldn’t even think twice about it and the knowledge that Charles has been in his mind, has turned Erik’s tendencies on them both infuriates him, angers him almost to the point of violence - 

“Why have you stopped? Erik, don’t stop,“

\- so instead he takes a deep breath and backs away slowly from that mental precipice; slows down his thrusts and becomes incredibly gentle. He caresses Charles, holds him like a something infinitely valuable through the red-hot almost-hate in the back of his head. It’s some sort of retaliation against Charles' infringement - not violent, because Charles expects that of him. Softness instead of rage. He’s giving Charles exactly what he wants, because he thinks Erik isn’t capable.

It doesn’t take long for Charles to come long white streaks against the ugly wallpaper. Erik pulls out, abrupt and still hard, and leaves the little sweaty, heaving ball of telepath sunken against the wall and goes and takes a shower.

 

It’s much later that Erik lies on the narrow bed, sullenly staring at what he can make out of the stain on the wall in the darkness. He fingers his coin, a nervous/angry twitch accompanied by a litany of hostile thoughts revolving for the most part around the other occupant of the room.

He’s interrupted by the very same man, who leans over from the other bed to prod him in the ribs and mutter, “Stop that.”

Erik looks at him.

Charles says, “Buzzing. Stop buzzing, I can’t sleep.“

"I'm not..."

"You're thinking too loud," Charles treacles through a yawn, and Erik marvels at how completely oblivious he seems.

He’s heard that no relationship is perfect. But, he wonders, how imperfect does it get before the end? Where is the invisible line in the sand, how far does he let this man, whom he hardly knows, go before he ends it, or it ends him?

So Erik doesn't answer. A few seconds of silence is broken by the rustle of sheets and the soft thud of bare feet before Charles squirms into the too-small space beside him. His smell is warm and intrinsically English - a smell that, when Erik is asked, he can only describe as being ‘very Charles’ - and it drains all the anger out of him, and leaves only fatigue. Imperfection is not Erik’s usual _modus operandi_.

Charles‘ toes curl around Erik‘s foot and he sounds half gone when he whispers, "Now shut up so we can get some rest, yeah?"

Erik shuts up and falls asleep almost immediately, and it doesn’t occur to him until the next day to wonder if Charles had anything to do with it.

***

It's Russia. It's the cold and the dogs and barbed wire that might have put one guard's eye out. The fear and adrenaline, maybe, or the intensity in the focus of Charles' eyes as he glares at Emma Frost.

It's how far Charles lets Erik go, how close he sees Erik come to killing, how easily he puts the Russian General to sleep.

Erik wonders what Frost would think if he fucked Charles right in front of her. What she’d say to Shaw/Shmidt, if Charles would even allow it. Some kind of bizarre punishment for her news about the devastation back at the base. He pictures her face, pictures the sounds Charles wouldn’t make, and by the strange way Charles is looking at him Erik guesses he must have gleaned some of that.

So he grins at the telepath, all the way back to the plane. He loves watching Charles squirm. 

 

It’s five hours into the flight, the cabin lights are dimmed and McTaggart is asleep across the isle with an eye mask over her face. Erik is too tense to rest. He’s tried staring out the window, flipping his coin between his fingers; tried engaging Charles in conversation, unsuccessfully. 

Charles is a thrumming tight string, fidgeting in the seat beside him. He looks like he needs to be distracted, and, Erik decides, they have enough time. He’s still half turned on from earlier, so he lays a hand on Charles’ thigh, tries leaning over and experimentally mouthing at his neck.

He gets pushed away. 

“Stop it,” Charles says.

Erik doesn’t.

“Erik.” A soft reprimand. “I'm not in the mood."

“Well, I am…” he tries, almost questioningly.

Charles makes a frustrated sound somewhere between a sigh and a grunt, and says, “No, you’re not.”

And Erik looks down to find that the mood has, in fact, left him. 

He’s about to angrily hiss, _How dare you?_ , but before he can open his mouth, Charles whispers harshly, “No, Erik, how dare you? Our friends might be dead, my sister,” he emphasises the word though Erik knows there is very little familial about that particular relationship, “might be dead. Now is not the time.” 

Charles’s eyes shine in the dark; they’re so close Erik can feel each exhale on his face. 

Charles gets up abruptly and goes somewhere else.

Erik does not follow.

***

The last time they have sex is in Charles’ library in Charles’ mansion. Charles smells of books and dust and he tastes drunk; his hands flutter about Erik like whispers, his thighs clench around him like he’s afraid to fall.

It’s soft and slow, so unlike their first time; Charles has learned to stay out of Erik’s head, and Erik to be less selfish with his pleasure. The chair’s legs scrape over the wooden floor beams with every little movement, back and forth, back and forth.

They’d been fighting. As with all of their disagreements, it remains unresolved; Charles avoids conflict like it's his job. He prefers love to war, sex to violence, and above all things, doesn‘t like it when Erik accuses him of being wrong. _Imperfect_ , Erik thinks, tasting Charles’ pale, pale skin. 

It’s quiet here, the whole world shrunk down to just the two of them. Tomorrow, he will tell Charles he doesn’t trust him in the most violent and final way he can think of. But for tonight, one last time, he marvels at the awkward way their bodies press together, at Charles’ silence, and at the way Erik loves him so completely that even thinking of parting from him makes him ache.

_Imperfect_ , Erik thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> In the process of moving all my works over to AO3.  
> This was originally posted on Livejournal here: http://sarensen.livejournal.com/3276.html


End file.
